Solar Orbiter spacecraft captures the solar corona in high resolution
(ORDO NEWS) — The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has experienced its second approach to the Sun.
Solar Orbiter was 0.29 AU away. from the sun. The picture is part of a video that was taken on October 13 by Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). The video was posted on ESA social networks.
The corona is the outer atmosphere of the Sun. A video taken during the rendezvous shows the dynamic nature of the million-degree hot solar corona. Solar plasma is in constant motion, guided and accelerated by the Sun’s magnetic field.
The Sun is currently approaching its peak activity, a solar maximum that it will reach in 2025. Thus, in the next few years, images of a “calm” corona are likely to become rare.
One of the main scientific tasks of Solar Orbiter is the study of the solar wind. The solar wind is made up of particles that travel throughout the solar system. It occurs in the corona, but the exact mechanism by which this occurs is poorly understood.
This approach became more productive due to the fact that Solar Orbiter was moving in the direction of the Earth.
This allowed much more data to be combined and coordinated observations to be made using ground-based telescopes.
“I look forward to uploading data from all ten instruments over the next few weeks and the global scientific community will then be very busy discovering new phenomena with this unique data set,” says Daniel Müller, ESA Solar Orbiter Project Scientist.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.
